


traveled the wide, wide world and came back to this

by Slumber



Category: SK8 the Infinity (Anime)
Genre: 5 Times, 5+1 Things, Canon Compliant, Denial of Feelings, M/M, Mistaken for Being in a Relationship, World Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-11 23:36:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29750748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slumber/pseuds/Slumber
Summary: “Hope your boyfriend lets you off the hook for whatever you did after this, huh?”“I’m not his boyfriend,” Kaoru snaps, picking up the one word he apparently knows before he exits the cab.Five times Kojiro and Kaoru were mistaken for a couple during their trips, and one time they admitted they were.
Relationships: Nanjo Kojiro | Joe/Sakurayashiki Kaoru | Cherry Blossom
Comments: 44
Kudos: 579





	traveled the wide, wide world and came back to this

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilery for ep8, which gave me much to think about.

The restaurant had been an utter dud, pretentious and overhyped, all flash and no substance. Kaoru’s still in a pissy mood after, and Kojiro is still starving—he’d thought the serving sizes in America were supposed to be big but they’d been given nothing but finger food, practically, so he drags Kaoru into the first burger joint he sees and chows down on something quick while he figures out how best to salvage the evening. 

“Tomorrow we are going with _my_ schedule,” Kaoru hisses, though it’s not nearly as sharp as earlier, now he’s got a Double-Double on hand and made Kojiro order the Gorilla Style off their secret menu. “Look, they have one just for you,” he’d said, and Kojiro wanted to turn that half-smile of his to full so fine. Fine.

It turns out to be a burger with fries in it, and Kojiro hates to admit it, but it’s not actually that bad. He grunts his agreement about the schedule. Fair’s fair, and that had been the plan, anyway. “Evening’s not over yet,” he reminds Kaoru.

Wandering around Los Angeles isn’t easy, not when you don’t know where you’re supposed to go, so Kojiro hails a cab and asks the driver to take them where things are popping for an extra twenty.

“Where did you tell him to go?” Kaoru asks, raising an eyebrow in the back seat with him.

Not for the first time, Kojiro’s grateful Kaoru’s English isn’t as good as his. “You’ll see,” he says, grinning as they pull up to what looks like the nightlife district. “You’re a good man,” he tells the cabbie, handing over the fare.

“Happy to help, sir,” he says. “Hope your boyfriend lets you off the hook for whatever you did after this, huh?”

“I’m not his boyfriend,” Kaoru snaps, picking up the one word he apparently knows before he exits the cab. 

But he doesn’t shake Kojiro’s hand away when he places it on the small of his back to lead him to the club.

* * *

“Exactly how many of these places are we supposed to visit?” Kojiro asks, scratching the back of his neck as they come upon the fourth—or was it fifth?—patisserie of the afternoon. 

“Aren’t _you_ the one who needs to research these things?” Kaoru shoots back at him, arms folded. “What were you going to do? Follow your nose across all of Paris?”

“You don’t learn a city off of Carla’s recommendations,” Kojiro says, but Kaoru had already furnished him with a printout of the rubric Carla had used to grade the top Parisian patisseries based on reviews, longevity, and placed on a scale from the traditional to the avant-garde.

“You’re running against the clock with an unplanned visit. You don’t know what you’ll miss just because you couldn’t be bothered to do basic research.” Kaoru huffs, checking his notes. “This one has the best cream puffs, supposedly, and their macarons are also well-regarded. Remind me again why you’re considering adding French desserts to an Italian restaurant?”

“Did I say that,” Kojiro murmurs, looking over the display—not at the cream puffs or macarons, but the neat little strawberry cakes with intricate decorations that Kaoru seems to like so much. “One of these, please.”

“Of course,” she says with a nod, taking Kojiro’s payment and placing the cake in a small paper bag for him. “There is a park down the street,” she adds. “It is a nice day to enjoy this there.”

“Are you done?” Kaoru asks, coming up behind him. He picks out a cream puff and a dozen macarons in a fancy box—souvenirs for his staff—before he follows Kojiro out to the park.

“Time for taste test number… I’m not keeping count,” Kojiro says, opening the paper bag to take the cake out. “Huh.”

“Hm?”

Kojiro pulls out the cake, which had been kept in a box that opens easily to a flat container. He pulls out a small fork and holds it up for Kaoru. “They gave me an extra fork,” he says. “Wanna share?”

* * *

“You remembered to book the appointment, didn’t you?” Kaoru asks for the third time since they returned to their room, boards tucked under their arms after a quick exploration of the side streets of Phuket. 

“When I made the reservation, yes, and I confirmed it as soon as we got in, and again before we left this morning,” Kojiro says, sighing. And it isn’t as though he wasn’t looking forward to it, either—after a day of skating, nothing sounded more heavenly than a massage for his aching muscles, after all. “You have so little faith.” 

“Just trying to figure out how your lackadaisical attitude could possibly ruin this one,” Kaoru grumbles, but the knot on his brow un-creases, and he seems a little bit more mollified. 

“Didn’t have to rely on my gut for this one, so I don’t see how you think that could ever happen,” he says, reaching to pull off his sweaty shirt.

“Kojiro!” 

“What?” he asks, blinking up to find Kaoru averting his gaze and grabbing his things before stalking into the bathroom to change. “It’s nothing you haven’t seen before.”

_“Shut up.”_

Kojiro snorts, but says nothing more of it as he waits for his turn at the shower. When they were both ready they make the small trek from their side of the resort to the main building where all the amenities were, and this Kojiro leaves to Kaoru’s tendency to feed every hotel’s blueprint to Carla’s connected devices. They find the facility easily enough, Kaoru leaning over the counter to check in at the front desk.

“Welcome,” the receptionist says, smiling at both of them. “We’re ready for you, if you could please follow me this way.”

“Thank you,” Kojiro says, cracking his neck as he lets her lead them through the hall. He’s already dreaming of the treatment he’s going to get, so he almost doesn’t notice when she opens a door and gestures for the both of them to come in. “Sorry, what—”

“Please take your time to get comfortable,” she says. “We’ll come by in a few minutes to begin your couple’s massage.”

* * *

“Carla didn’t warn you about the cobblestones to get there, did she?” Kojiro can’t help asking. He adjusts the weight on his backpack, wondering how long he’s going to let Kaoru struggle with his rolling bag before he offers to help. 

“I didn’t ask or she would have,” Kaoru snarls, his face a perfect shade of furious. 

Brussels had not been on the itinerary, but neither was the storm that threatened to cancel their connection in Dublin. It had been Kojiro’s idea to scrap their return flights in favor of booking new ones that would have them connecting elsewhere, and Kaoru’s speedy research that found them a place to stay for the night in the city. Their last day was shot thanks to all these last-minute changes, but even then Kaoru couldn’t help trying to milk all the planning he could out of it.

“I found us a centrally located hotel in the heart of the old town here,” he says as his poor rolling bag struggles through the uneven street. No way they’d get any skating done in this kind of street. “It has high reviews and is very reasonably priced for something we booked the night before.”

“Sure, sure,” Kojiro says, magnanimous enough to open the door for Kaoru as they walk into the hotel.

“Welcome to Brussels,” the man at reception says as he checks them in. “Ah, you have room 202, it is very nice, very cozy. I hope you enjoy your stay.”

“Thank you,” they both say, before finding the stairs to the second floor. 

“What did he say?” Kaoru asks. “After ‘very nice’?”

“Uh. Cozy, I think.”

“What does that mean?”

“I think it’s something Europeans like to say to mean small,” Kojiro says with a shrug, looking up the rooms to find theirs. He swipes the key fob in and opens the door to find his hunch was right. “Well, well, well.”

“I—”

“Let me guess,” Kojiro says, glancing sideways at Kaoru. “Didn’t check the number of beds before booking, did you.” 

“It said it was a double room,” Kaoru stammers. “I booked us double beds.”

“At least it looks like it can fit two,” Kojiro says, snorting. It looked like those beds that were actually two beds just bumped together and covered by one large mattress pad, in all honesty, but it was also either large enough it took up nearly all of the room, or the room was just that small. “Fine last-minute research by Carla there.”

“Carla’s—” Kaoru starts, the rest of his sentence cut off into something that sounds almost like a squeak. 

“Yeah, yeah,” Kojiro says, shaking his head. “Well, it’s only for one night,” he adds, gaze scanning the rest of the room so he can freshen up for the evening. 

That’s when he notices the sink near the foot of the bed, almost camouflaged because it was on a wooden structure, and the sink itself was one of those modern stone-material types that nearly blended into the decor. 

“That’s weird,” he says, blinking as he sees, next to it, the porcelain of a bathtub. Why is he seeing a bathtub? And the shower fixtures on the wall above it? “Where’s the—”

“Bathroom?” Kaoru echoes behind him, something in his voice sounding a little too calm. Like thinly veiled hysteria. “I think it’s just a bath. No room.”

“There’s a—” Kojiro clears his throat. “Well, there’s a glass partition, I guess.”

“A half-partition. It only covers the half of the tub that’s by the shower.”

“I can see that,” Kojiro says. Anyone, really, can see that, from anywhere they might choose to stay in the room. He glances back at Kaoru. “Carla didn’t warn you about this either, did she?”

* * *

“Congratulations,” Kaoru says when they stumble back into their room, soaking wet and dripping water everywhere on the thankfully tiled floor. “Booking us a trip to the Dominican Republic _during hurricane season_ has to absolutely top the list of your disastrous decisions thanks to your boneheaded refusal to plan anything.”

“Tickets were cheap, thought you’d like that,” Kojiro says, wringing his shirt out to dry. They’d been at the beach for less than an hour before the sky had darkened and the storm rolled up to them all of a sudden, on their first full day there. The man at the lobby said that was probably going to last them the rest of the week they were there.

“You live in an island—shouldn’t you know this?” Kaoru asks, gathering his hair up to squeeze the water off it. “Urgh, I’m going to take a bath.”

“Wait, no, me first,” Kojiro says. “I practically covered you the entire run back here.”

“And I’m _still_ drenched!” Kaoru says, rushing to the bathroom the same time Kojiro does.

They stumble into the bathroom at the same time—it was at least spacious, and again, Kojiro would like to point out, for an incredibly low price!—so they also both see, at the same time, that the bath’s already been run, the scent of something floral and sweet wafting in the air. 

Maybe it was from whatever the staff had used to make the bath all bubbly.

Or maybe it was from the rose petals they’d scattered to float on the bath’s surface. 

Or the scented candles balanced on the bath’s edge. 

Or maybe, even, it came from the tray of chocolates and chocolate-dipped strawberries artfully placed across the center of the tub.

“I guess they’ve, uh, come by for turndown service,” Kojiro says.

Kaoru gives him a look. “I call dibs on the strawberries.”

* * *

The evening is warm and the wine’s been flowing freely, the food rich and delicious in ways that appeal to both of them, for once, and dinner under the stars is turning out to be the best way to cap off a day of rigorous walking up and down the hills of Santorini.

“Just so we’re clear,” Kojiro says, “this was _my_ find.”

“Excuse me? I looked this place up first.”

Kojiro scoffs, his gaze on the way Kaoru’s nose turns pink when he’s tipsy. He’s wearing his glasses tonight, his hair loose around his shoulders like they need to be pushed back, but Kojiro keeps his hand to his side. “It was in your list, sure,” he says, “but you didn’t tell us to go here tonight. _I_ was the one who led us here. Followed the nose, didn’t I?”

Kaoru snorts, an unrefined sound from someone normally so pristine. He holds the glass of wine up to his lips and tips his head back to drink it all in. “Please,” he says. “You remembered it from the list I gave you.”

“You think I read those lists of yours?” 

Kaoru leans forward, resting his chin on the heel of his palm. He gives him a half-lidded smile. “More than you’d like to admit,” he says.

“Hah,” Kojiro says, feeling heat creep up his cheeks. “You wish.”

“I don’t have to,” Kaoru says. He looks entirely too smug for someone who’ll be stumbling-drunk on their way back to the hotel, but before he can say more, the first strings of a ballad begin to fill in the quiet of the evening. 

The low murmur of conversation around them lowers to a hush as all the other diners nearby turn their attention to the source of the music, as Kojiro does. As Kaoru does, too. 

“I didn’t see them setting up,” Kaoru murmurs of the string quartet that plays next to an open space, the glow of the restaurant lamp lights bathing them in a warm yellow. 

“Look,” Kojiro says, grinning as an elderly couple stands up from a nearby table, the older man holding his wife by the hand. “It’s for dancing.” 

“I guess it is,” Kaoru, in a rare moment, agrees, turning quiet as he watches other diners follow the first couple’s lead, turning the once empty space into an impromptu dance floor. There’s a ghost of a smile on his lips, his face softer and gentler as he watches all this unfold, light catching in his honey gold eyes like the shimmer of moonlight off the ocean.

“It’s a beautiful night for dancing,” someone whispers near Kojiro’s ear. He nearly jumps out of his skin, realizing his gaze had been stuck on Kaoru all this time, and when he turns around it’s to meet the knowing smile of the diner at the table beside theirs. He’s already on his feet with the woman he’s with, ready to head over, but not before giving Kaoru one more meaningful look before he nods at Kojiro.

“Hey,” he says, and Kaoru’s palm is warm against his when he slips his hand to take it. 

Kaoru jolts, but he doesn’t pull away. His cheeks are pink and his lips glossy with wine—probably just as sweet, too—and when Kojiro pulls him to his feet his eyes grow wide only ever so slightly. 

“Come dance with me,” Kojiro says.

“Do you even know how?” Kaoru asks, even as he follows Kojiro to the square, lets him place his hands on his hips and looks up at him with the curl of a smile tugging at the corner of his lips. 

Kojiro smiles. “Why don’t you let me show you?”

**Author's Note:**

> Haven't been able to travel for a year so I guess thanks to Joe and Cherry and Sk8 ep8 for letting me live vicariously through them. (The hotel in Brussels exists. I booked it with my best friend and kept it in my back pocket for a fic just like this. The rest may or may not be made up.) I can't believe this is canon.
> 
> ANYWAY. Thank you for reading! Kudos and comments are always appreciated ♥
> 
> If you liked what you've read, you can [share the tweet here.](https://twitter.com/slumberish/status/1365899112550445061?s=20) I've also written [other Matcha Blossom fic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slumber/pseuds/Slumber/works?fandom_id=52382346).


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